I found this article on ZDNet today: Following up on Brilliant Digital Entertainment, the company that secretly installed its own peer-to-peer network on perhaps millions of individual users’ PCs, I’d like to pose a few questions.
For those who have been away from the melee, ZDNet reporter John Borland discovered earlier this week that Brilliant had been piggy-backing its software with downloads of the file-swapping software, Kazaa.
When the Brilliant network is activated, the software uses the Internet bandwidth, hard drive space, and processor cycles of individual users’ computers to distribute content on behalf of Brilliant’s commercial clients. The software might also use your spare processor cycles or idle CPU time to run computing tasks for those clients.
